Plate 22.—Decoration of the Boudoir of Madame de Serilly: French, Eighteenth Century.
To face p. 77.]
[Victoria and Albert Museum.
Plate 23.—Decoration of the Boudoir of Madame de Serilly: French, Eighteenth Century.
historians was ushered in after the Revolution of 1830, when greater attention was paid to the interesting works in art and literature of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance, and one of the consequences of this great movement was the revival of colour decoration on buildings. Many old frescoes which had been covered with whitewash, not only in France, but in Germany, in the Rhine valley, and in England also, were once more brought to light, after the whitewash of previous centuries had been removed. Many French architects, artists, and archæologists, among whom were Prosper Merimée, Didron, and Viollet-le-Duc, advocated a more generous use of colour, not only in the interiors, but on the exteriors of buildings. Many works on ancient art were published about this time, which also contributed to the education of the public taste, and French architects and students were becoming enthusiasts for the application of deep colouring to architecture, being led in this direction by the discoveries of Hittorf, in 1823, and subsequently by others, who went out to Greece and Sicily and found traces of strong colouring on the ancient Greek temples at Segesta and Selinus in Sicily. Hittorf was the first to discover and make known the ancient polychromy of the Greeks. The traces of colouring which he found on the three temples near the Acropolis of Selinus, and those on the small temple of Empedocles at the same place, enabled him to restore the colouring of these buildings, and in 1851 he published his work, entitled L’Architecture Polychrôme chez les Grecs, and also a view of the great Temple of Jupiter. About the same time the sculptor Thorwaldsen also found numerous traces of blue, red, and gold on the Temple of Ægina. Hittorf’s discoveries of Greek colouring were at first received in France with a good deal of scepticism and violent opposition, as he was told that the colouring of the Sicilian temples was only the remains of “the vulgar daubing of Byzantine, Norman, or Arab origin.” It is now, however, clearly proved by the light of subsequent investigations that Greek polychromy was a tradition of the colouring of still older temples, and that the latter was only a development of the archaic polychromy of the primitive Mycenian decorators, who in their turn derived it from Egyptian sources.
About the middle of the nineteenth century the art of colour decoration on buildings was greatly advanced, as the public were becoming familiarised with ancient work by means of copies made of it, illustrated books, and photographs of Pompeian, Roman, Greek, Byzantine, Persian, Egyptian, Eastern and Italian Renaissance work. The decoration of buildings in France in the nineteenth century in respect to the revival of polychromy may therefore be looked upon as a veritable colour renaissance, for a reaction had set in against the almost colourless buildings of the two former centuries. Not only was colour extensively employed in the interiors of French buildings, but on the exteriors it was used in a structural sense by the employment of natural coloured materials, such as marbles, bronze, terra-cotta and enamelled earthenware, and by the applied decoration of mosaic.
The architects, Duban and Labrouste, were among the first to assist in the creation of this new taste for colour, they having thoroughly studied the remains of Greek and Roman architecture, and especially the colour decoration of Pompeii. Duban set about the work of restoring the colour decorations of the Sainte Chapelle, in Paris, and those of the Chateau-de-Blois, where in the latter he used ceramic tiles successfully in the decoration, taking his models from the tile work of the Middle Ages. Other works done by Duban, or under his directions, were the restoration of the Galerie-du-Louvre in the painted “loge” and decorated ceiling, and at the École des Beaux-Arts, the “Loggie-di-Rafaele,” in the galleries of the first storey, and the porticoes in the Cour-du-Murier, which he decorated in the Pompeian style. Duban employed marble, enamelled pottery, terra-cotta and iron, as well as paint, for his decorative colour schemes.